User devices often present “notifications” to alert a user that a particular type of data or information has been received by the user device. Most applications can generate notifications. For example, phone, email, messaging, and social media applications are all capable of generating notifications that are displayed on the device by an operating system's notification manager. These notifications can be displayed on the lock screen as well as a notification board (also known as a “notification drawer” in ANDRIOD systems and a “notification center” in iOS systems).
The volume and frequency of notifications can quickly overwhelm a user. To solve this problem, a user must manually adjust the notification settings on the device or risk missing important notifications among a sea of less-important notifications. Even then, the user can miss important notifications if the device is set to filter out too many notifications.
The operating system of a user device typically relies on applications to accurately self-report the importance level of each notification they generate. Using these self-reported values, the operating system's notification manager can prioritize the notifications based on their reported importance level, among other things. Unfortunately, some applications take advantage of this system by artificially inflating the importance levels of their notifications. These applications undermine the notification system and force the user to either correct the issue manually or endure a flood of irrelevant notifications.
Some previous approaches focus on emphasizing the importance of certain notifications based on user behavior. However, these approaches are limited in that they still rely on the self-reported importance level of each notification, which can be manipulated by applications.
As one example, U.S. Pat. No. 8,707,201 describes technology that ranks notifications based on user interactions with the notifications. But these rankings are only applied after the operating system receives application-reported importance levels for notifications. The system, therefore, has no ability to curtail an application from incorrectly reporting importance levels for its notifications. Moreover, that system cannot account for the user's actions within the relevant application itself.
As a result, a need exists for systems and methods that intelligently modify the importance level of notifications before the notifications are provided to a notification manager of the user device.